From the Academy: Moral Worth and Public Schools

WISDOM AND VIRTUE, Plato says, are the ends of education. Whether or not most public schools impart wisdom, some of those educational functionaries charged with the conduct of public instruction endeavor to ignore the inculcating of virtue. In a time when the order of the soul and the order of the community both have fallen into confusion, often the teaching of moral worth is honored in the breach, not the observance.

Take New York City. Last December, New York’s school chancellor ruled that students otherwise eligible for graduation from high school must be granted diplomas, regardless of their character and conduct. Late in February, the commissioner of education for the state of New York decreed that no public-school pupil may be denied a diploma because of “lack of good citizenship.” These decisions have caused a mighty uproar among school principals; and Assemblyman John A. Esposito has introduced into the legislature a bill that would restore the requirement of “citizenship and character development.”

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Russell Kirk

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WISDOM AND VIRTUE, Plato says, are the ends of education. Whether or not most public schools impart wisdom, some of those educational functionaries charged with the conduct of public instruction endeavor to ignore the inculcating of virtue. In a time when the order of the soul and the order of the community both have fallen into confusion, often the teaching of moral worth is honored in the breach, not the observance.

Take New York City. Last December, New York’s school chancellor ruled that students otherwise eligible for graduation from high school must be granted diplomas, regardless of their character and conduct. Late in February, the commissioner of education for the state of New York decreed that no public-school pupil may be denied a diploma because of “lack of good citizenship.” These decisions have caused a mighty uproar among school principals; and Assemblyman John A. Esposito has introduced into the legislature a bill that would restore the requirement of “citizenship and character development.”